Back to the beginning...

I previously mentioned reading Michael Lewis. Well, I just got his latest book, and found it rather disappointing. It was all good material, but just about all of it duplicate Vanity Fair articles that he wrote recently.

Actually, now that I was looking at Vanity Fair's site again to find links to those articles, I'm even more disappointed, because even more of it came out of Vanity Fair than I thought (I'd only seen the first two of those before reading the book).

It affects the prose, a little bit, because, for instance, the Ireland section mentions something about Greece without making it a reference back. And the book ends without a real conclusion; it just kind of drops off a cliff.

As I said, it's still good material, so I'm not totally down on it, but it could have been a bit more, I think. And I would have liked if it had gotten into more details of the trouble, with more details about where we go from here. I'm not sure exactly what I mean by that last statement, but, for instance, at the end of The Big Short, I really felt like I had a good handle on what happened with the mortgage crisis. I don't feel like I have that, now.

I'm very tempted to get John Mauldin's Endgame, which reviews indicate might give that level of understanding.

The takeaway, though, is certainly that much of the world is in very bad shape; perhaps even worse than indicated by watching the news. Excessive debt has caused a lot of problems, and will continue to do so for quite a while.

Complete Lack of Balance

Two really good pieces about how unbalanced taxes have gotten between the rich and middle class. The first is by Robert Reich, and can be found at Salon. The second is by Joseph Stiglitz, and can be found at Vanity Fair (in one page).

Both are must-reads, if you're concerned about where this nation is heading. The second one is particularly important, I think, as it ties in a couple of factors I hadn't previously considered. In particular, why we can't seem to get out of any of the wars in which we're currently involved.